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America's Vice President "expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline," reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said "There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.") The article adds that TikTok owner ByteDance "has not publicly confirmed negotiations with any potential U.S. buyer, nor has it confirmed its willingness to sell TikTok to a U.S. bidder." But ByteDance "favors" a deal with Oracle, according to an X.com post on Thursday from tech-publication The Information. And today Politico adds that Oracle "is accelerating talks with the White House on a deal to run TikTok, though significant concerns remain about what role the app's Chinese founders will play in its ongoing U.S. operation, according to three people familiar with the discussions." [Oracle's discussions are happening] amid ongoing warnings from congressional Republicans and other China hawks that any new ownership deal — if it keeps TikTok's underlying technology in Chinese hands — could be only a surface-level fix to the security concerns that led to last year's sweeping bipartisan ban of the app. Key lawmakers, including concerned Republicans, are bringing in Oracle this week to discuss the possible deal and rising national security concerns, according to four people familiar with the meetings. One of the three people familiar with the discussions with Oracle said the deal would essentially require the U.S. government to depend on Oracle to oversee the data of American users and ensure the Chinese government doesn't have a backdoor to it — a promise the person warned would be impossible to keep. "If the Oracle deal moves forward, you still have this [algorithm] controlled by the Chinese...." The data security company HaystackID, which serves as independent security inspectors for TikTok U.S., said in February that it has found no indications of internal or external malicious activity — nor has it identified any protected U.S. user data that has been shared with China.

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After Meta convinced an arbitrator to temporarily prevent a whistleblower from promoting their book about the company (titled: Careless People), the book climbed to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. And the book's publisher Macmillan released a defiant statement that "The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan... We will absolutely continue to support and promote it." (They added that they were "appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.") Saturday the controversy was even covered by Rolling Stone: [Whistleblower Sarah] Wynn-Williams is a diplomat, policy expert, and international lawyer, with previous roles including serving as the Chief Negotiator for the United Nations on biosafety liability, according to her bio on the World Economic Forum... Since the book's announcement, Meta has forcefully responded to the book's allegations in a statement... "Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books." But the negative coverage continues, with the Observer Sunday highlighting it as their Book of the Week. "This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant organisation describes a 'diabolical cult' able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world's vulnerable..." Though ironically Wynn-Williams started their career with optimism about Facebook's role in the app internet.org. . "Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg's company could make a difference — but in a good way — to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project... What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams's eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg's initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves "delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world". But Facebook's impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country's Muslim minority. "Myanmar," she writes with a lapsed believer's rue, "would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived." And what is true of Myanmar, you can't help but reflect, applies globally... "Myanmar is where Wynn-Williams thinks the 'carelessness' of Facebook is most egregious," writes the Sunday Times: In 2018, UN human rights experts said Facebook had helped spread hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, about 25,000 of whom were slaughtered by the Burmese military and nationalists. Facebook is so ubiquitous in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams points out, that people think it is the entire internet. "It's no surprise that the worst outcome happened in the place that had the most extreme take-up of Facebook." Meta admits it was "too slow to act" on abuse in its Myanmar services.... After Wynn-Williams left Facebook, she worked on an international AI initiative, and says she wants the world to learn from the mistakes we made with social media, so that we fare better in the next technological revolution. "AI is being integrated into weapons," she explains. "We can't just blindly wander into this next era. You think social media has turned out with some issues? This is on another level."

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Debian Linux 12.10 drops just in time for St. Patrick’s Day with security fixes  BetaNews

"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...) No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these three contenders, so the very emergence of Bolt Graphics seems like a breakthrough. However, the major focuses of Bolt's Zeus are high-quality rendering for movie and scientific industries as well as high-performance supercomputer simulations. If Zeus delivers on its promises, it could establish itself as a serious alternative for scientific computing, path tracing, and offline rendering. But without strong software support, it risks struggling against dominant market leaders. This week the Sunnyvale, California-based startup introduced its Zeus GPU platform designed for gaming, rendering, and supercomputer simulations, according to the article. "The company says that its Zeus GPU not only supports features like upgradeable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, but it can also beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 by around 10 times in path tracing workloads, according to slide published by technology news site ServeTheHome." There is one catch: Zeus can only beat the RTX 5090 GPU in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads. It's not clear how well it will handle traditional rendering techniques, as that was less of a focus. In speaking with Bolt Graphics, the card does support rasterization, but there was less emphasis on that aspect of the GPU, and it may struggle to compete with the best graphics cards when it comes to gaming. And when it comes to data center options like Nvidia's Blackwell B200, it's an entirely different matter. Unlike GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia that rely on proprietary instruction set architectures, Bolt's Zeus relies on the open-source RISC-V ISA, according to the published slides. The Zeus core relies on an open-source out-of-order general-purpose RVA23 scalar core mated with FP64 ALUs and the RVV 1.0 (RISC-V Vector Extension Version 1.0) that can handle 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit data types as well as Bolt's additional proprietary extensions designed for acceleration of scientific workloads... Like many processors these days, Zeus relies on a multi-chiplet design... Unlike high-end GPUs that prioritize bandwidth, Bolt is evidently focusing on greater memory size to handle larger datasets for rendering and simulations. Also, built-in 400GbE and 800GbE ports to enable faster data transfer across networked GPUs indicates the data center focus of Zeus. High-quality rendering, real-time path tracing, and compute are key focus areas for Zeus. As a result, even the entry-level Zeus 1c26-32 offers significantly higher FP64 compute performance than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — up to 5 TFLOPS vs. 1.6 TFLOPS — and considerably higher path tracing performance: 77 Gigarays vs. 32 Gigarays. Zeus also features a larger on-chip cache than Nvidia's flagship — up to 128MB vs. 96MB — and lower power consumption of 120W vs. 575W, making it more efficient for simulations, path tracing, and offline rendering. However, the RTX 5090 dominates in AI workloads with its 105 FP16 TFLOPS and 1,637 INT8 TFLOPS compared to the 10 FP16 TFLOPS and 614 INT8 TFLOPS offered by a single-chiplet Zeus... The article emphasizes that Zeus "is only running in simulation right now... Bolt Graphics says that the first developer kits will be available in late 2025, with full production set for late 2026." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader arvn for sharing the news.

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I Explored the Biggest Man Pages on Linux, Here’s What I Learned  How-To Geek

Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon: In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable as it interprets scripts. Codon fixes types and compiles Python into compact, executable binaries that execute much faster. Several things have changed with their latest release: I have successful compiles, the committers have added a compiled version of NumPy (high performance math algorithms), and changed their open source license to Apache 2. "The other big news is that Exaloop, the company that is behind Codon, has changed their license to Apache 2..." according to the article, so "commercial use and derivations of Codon are now permitted without licensing."

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A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center. And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates to plant ransomware and negotiate with victims, notes the Register. "Even organizations that have good ransomware recovery regimes, meaning they don't need to unscramble encrypted data as they have good backups and fall-back plans, may consider paying to prevent the release of their stolen data, given the unpleasant consequences that follow information leaks. Medusa actors also set a deadline for victims to pay ransoms and provide a countdown timer that makes it plain when stolen info will be sprayed across the internet. If victims cough up $10,000 in cryptocurrency, the crims push the deadline forward by 24 hours. The advisory reveals one Medusa actor has taken things a step further. "FBI investigations identified that after paying the ransom, one victim was contacted by a separate Medusa actor who claimed the negotiator had stolen the ransom amount already paid," the advisory states. That separate actor then "requested half of the payment be made again to provide the 'true decryptor'," the advisory states, describing this incident as "potentially indicating a triple extortion scheme." The security groups' advisory stresses that they "do not encourage paying ransoms as payment does not guarantee victim files will be recovered. Furthermore, payment may also embolden adversaries to target additional organizations..." (But "Regardless of whether you or your organization have decided to pay the ransom, FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC urge you to promptly report ransomware incidents...) Besides updating software and operating systems, the alert makes these recommendations for organizations: Require VPNs (or jump hosts) for remote network access Block remote access from unknown/untrusted origins, and disable unused ports Segment networks to help prevent the spread of ransomware Use a networking monitoring tool to spot and investigate abnormal activity — including lateral movement (using endpoint detection and response tools). Log all network traffic, and monitor it for unauthorized scanning and access attempts. Create recovery plans with encrypted offline backups of sensitive/proprietary data and servers Require multifactor authentication, use strong (and long) passwords, and "consider not requiring frequently recurring password changes, as these can weaken security." (Also audit access control following the principle of least privilege, and watch for new and/or unrecognized accounts.) Disable command-line and scripting activities and permissions.

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Huawei Matebook E Go Laptops To Be Better Supported With Linux 6.15  Phoronix

Garuda Linux Might Be the Best Looking Desktop OS on the Market  The New Stack

The Washington Post reports: Oceans last year reached their highest levels in three decades — with the rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35% higher than expected, according to a NASA-led analysis published Thursday... Last year's rate of average global sea level rise was 0.23 inches per year, higher than the expected 0.17 inches per year, NASA said in a news release. The rate of global sea level rise follows a trend of rapidly increasing rates over the past 30 years. From 1993 to 2023, the rate of global sea level rise doubled, increasing from 0.08 inches per year to 0.18 inches, another NASA-led study showed. Overall, the global sea level has climbed by 4 inches since 1993. More details from ABC News: Climate change was a major driver to an unexpected level of sea level rise in 2024, according to a new NASA analysis... The majority of the difference between predicted and actual sea level rise was attributed to thermal expansion — or the ocean waters expanding as they warm, researchers said. An unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers, led to the increase of sea level rise last year, according to NASA. About two-thirds of sea level rise in recent years has resulted from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, with a third coming from thermal expansion, according to NASA. In 2024, those metrics flipped, with two-thirds of the rise attributed to expanding ocean water and one-third attributed to contributions from melting ice. "With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth's expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA... Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, climate research shows.

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Linux 6.14-rc7 To Support A Few More Gaming Controllers  Phoronix

Linux Kernel's Rust Support Being Expanded To HID Drivers  Phoronix

Did you see this Linux DE running on Android?  Android Police

"A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit," reports the BBC, "in the Brazilian city of Belém." The highway will ease traffic into the city, which will host over 50,000 people at the conference this November: The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact... Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side — a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém. Diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area... The road leaves two disconnected areas of protected forest. Scientists are concerned it will fragment the ecosystem and disrupt the movement of wildlife... The state government of Pará had touted the idea of this highway, known as Avenida Liberdade, as early as 2012, but it had repeatedly been shelved because of environmental concerns. Now a host of infrastructure projects have been resurrected or approved to prepare the city for the COP summit. But on the bright side, Adler Silveira, the state government's infrastructure secretary, said the highway would have wildlife crossings for animals to pass over, as well as climate-friendly bike lanes and solar-powered lighting...

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Update: Helium Mobile just sent me an e-mail offering $50 in Cloud points (supposedly redeemable for gift cards to Airbnb, DoorDash, and Nike) for new customers if you open with the promo code GETLUCKY. Expires 11:59pm PT on March 18, 2025. Must be subscribed for at least 30 days in order to use points in Cloud Store. I’m still not a huge fan of their location tracking, but if you’re gonna go for this plan but haven’t yet, get the $50 in points!

Original post:

Helium Mobile is offering a “free” cellular plan that includes 100 minutes talk, 300 texts, and 3 GB of data per month (no hotspot). You have to upload a government-issued ID (name, address, date of birth, ID number), but you don’t need to provide a credit card. You also have to always allow Location Sharing so they can always track your exact location. Helium Mobile is a T-Mobile MVNO, so you will need a compatible unlocked GSM phone.

The free plan is currently waitlist-only unless you have an invite code, but one of the following invite codes should work to provide you immediate access. Click on the “Got an invite code?” link on the front page. Both iOS and Android apps are available. Try these:

• JGKOS6O (my referral code)
• HELIUMCEO
• HELIUMFREE
• BREAKFREE

They offer both eSIM and physical SIMs, but as of now the physical SIMs are out of stock and the expected wait time is at least a few weeks.

This is not the first cellular carrier to promote a “free” plan, nor the first to try and build a network of people sharing their WiFi for theoretically low-cost data (“Helium Hotspots”), and you shouldn’t be surprised that the reason beyond this new one is “something something crypto”. They never seem to last very long, and in the past have had hidden fees (FreedomPop) and sometimes required too much effort (RingPlus).

I probably wouldn’t bother using this as your primary number due to the hassle of porting in and out again possibly soon, but having an extra phone number can be useful for a variety of reasons. Some special offers are effectively limited to one per phone number, and sometimes you may not want to give out your primary phone number. You might have an old phone you want to use, or you could just add an eSIM number to your existing phone.

I’m concerned that the always-on location sharing would be a drain on battery life (in addition to your privacy). They say they use Fitness data which is less draining, but I’m still dubious. I would probably learn towards using an old phone.

"Why can't we each have our own AI software that runs locally," asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM — and that doesn't steal the work of others. Imagine a powerful-but-locally-hosted LLM that "doesn't spy... and no one else owns it." We download it, from souce-code if you like, install it, if we want. And it assists: us... No one gate-keeps it. It's not out to get us... And this is important: because no one owns it, the AI software is ours and leaks no data anywhere — to no one, no company, for no political nor financial purpose. No one profits — but you! Their longer original submission also asks a series of related questions — like why can't we have software without AI? (Along with "Why is AMD stamping AI on local-processors?" and "Should AI be crowned the ultimate hype?") But this question seems to be at the heart of their concern. "What future will anyone have if anything they really wanted to do — could be mimicked and sold by the ill-gotten work of others...?" "Could local, open-source, AI software be the only answer to dishearten billionaire companies from taking and selling back to their customers — everything we have done? Could we not...instead — steal their dream?!" Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments. Where are the open-source, local-only AI solutions?

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Btrfs, which stands for "Butter FS" or "B-tree FS," is a modern Linux file system. It was developed to overcome the limitations of older file systems like ext4 or ext3. Btrfs is an excellent choice for efficient storage management on multiple Hard Disk Drivers. It supports Linux file systems with snapshots, subvolumes, and built-in RAID-like capabilities that provide robust data protection. It is designed to handle huge file systems and file sizes. Btrfs incorporates checksumming and COW (Copy-on-write), making it more resilient to data corruption. The COW feature means changes are written to new locations instead of overwriting existing data, enhancing data protection and enabling snapshots. After installation, let us see how to install Btrfs support for Debian Linux 11 or 12 using the CLI. Why am I using BTRFS on an existing Debian Linux system? In my case, the EC2 VM AMI is configured to use ext4 by default at AWS. However, I had to make changes since I needed to store files using EBS (Elastic Block Store) and Python code expected to see BTRFS. Hence, this quick tutorial. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to install BTRFS on a Debian Linux 12/11 appeared first on nixCraft. 2024-02-14T06:10:00Z 2024-02-14T06:10:00Z Vivek Gite

"For the first time in history, a privately operated lunar lander has captured images of a total eclipse from the Moon's surface," reports Daily Galaxy. While the Athena lunar lander tipped over and ended its mission, elsewhere on the moon Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander "continues to beam home incredible imagery," writes Space.com, and since its landing on March 2 "has been sending us stunning photos and videos..." A new video of Blue Ghost's moon-side view captures the eerie red light on the moon (caused by sunlight refracting through the atmosphere over the edges of the earth). "Blue Ghost turns red!" Firefly writes on their mission updates page. A SpaceX photographer also captured the eclipse as it happened over a Falcon 9 rocket waiting to launch to the International Space Station, in a remarkable time-lapse photograph. And Space.com collects more interesting lunar-eclipse photos taken from around the world, including Appin, Scotland; Canberra, Australia; and Palm Springs, California...

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Long-time Slashdot reader BenFenner writes: For the third time in recent memory, CloudFlare has blocked large swaths of niche browsers and their users from accessing web sites that CloudFlare gate-keeps. In the past these issues have been resolved quickly (within a week) and apologies issued with promises to do better. (See 2024-03-11, 2024-07-08, and 2025-01-30.) This time around it has been over six weeks and CloudFlare has been unable or unwilling to fix the problem on their end, effectively stalling any progress on the matter with various tactics including asking browser developers to sign overarching NDAs. That last link is an update posted today by Pale Moon's main developer: Our current situation remains unchanged: CloudFlare is still blocking our access to websites through the challenges, and the captcha/turnstile continues to hang the browser until our watchdog terminates the hung script after which it reloads and hangs again after a short pause (but allowing users to close the tab in that pause, at least). To say that this upsets me is an understatement. Other than deliberate intent or absolute incompetence, I see no reason for this to endure. Neither of those options are very flattering for CloudFlare. I wish I had better news. In a comment, Slashdot reader BenFenner shares a list posted by Pale Moon's developer of reportedly affected browsers: Pale MoonBasiliskWaterfoxFalkonSeaMonkeyVarious Firefox ESR flavorsThorium (on some systems)Ungoogled ChromiumK-MeleonLibreWolfMyPal 68Otter browser Slashdot reader Z00L00K speculates that "this is some kind of anti-bot measure that fails. I suspect that the reason for them wanting a NDA to be signed is to prevent ways to circumvent the anti-bot measures..."

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Debian 12.10 Released With More Bugs Fixed & Security Updates  Phoronix